Once again, the woman cleans up the mess

The statement from ABC journalist Ashleigh Raper on what she says Labor leader Luke Foley drunkenly did to her at a Christmas Party in 2016, tells you everything you need to know about why women generally don’t report sexual harassment.

Luke Foley has said the allegations against him are false, and has indicated he will sue for defamation.

ABC journalist Ashleigh Raper (inset) has released an explosive statement of allegations against former NSW opposition leader Luke Foley.Credit:Fairfax Media

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Mostly women don't report because it invariably falls on them to manage the consequences of doing so.

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And for something that is so routinely minimised as women not being able to take a joke, or women over-reacting, or women making victims of themselves, sexual harassment can have huge consequences.

Firstly - for the man involved.

As her statement makes clear, Raper did not want to be the person who brought down a leader, and therefore, very possibly, influence the result of the next state election.

She probably did not want to be the person to bring disgrace on someone so public, even though, if we believe her account, it is really Foley who has done that to himself. Foley himself denies Raper's allegations.

She probably had in mind Foley’s wife and children.

Then, there were the serious consequences for Raper herself.

As she makes clear in her statement, she never wanted to make a complaint to her employer, or more publicly, because she wanted to keep her job at state parliament.

She feared the impact the publicity would have on herself and her young family.

"That impact is now being felt profoundly," she writes, with journalistic precision that speaks volumes in its spareness.

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She also makes it clear how rudely the choice was taken from her hands, most brutally by Corrections Minister David Elliott. It was Elliott who revived the issue when he mentioned it in Parliament, under the cover of parliamentary privilege.

Senator Eric Abetz then raised it in federal Budget Estimates under the spurious cover of attacking the ABC for an alleged lack of sensitive human resources management.

"Situations like mine should not be discussed in Parliament for the sake of political point scoring. And I want it to stop," Raper writes.

There is a view among some in politics and the media that a reluctance to report on Raper’s alleged harassment amounted to a protection racket for Foley.

That is a conflation of two very different issues - Foley’s fitness for leadership, versus the right of a woman to control if and when she tells her own story.

But it is true that for months, people in the media have known more about this story than they have been able to report.

One of the things I have been asked most often is: what exactly did Foley allegedly do? How bad was it? Was it a bum-pat, or a grope? A kiss or a squeeze? Where exactly did the hand allegedly go?

It is some sort of weird calculus of alleged sex pestery: how bad does it have to be to make a man unfit for leadership?

Can he still be a good Premier even if he’s allegedly a touch gropey? Can we excuse him for being drunk?

All of these questions really come back to one central point about how much we value women, and what premium we place on their ability to walk through life unmolested by men, powerful and otherwise, who put their hands on them, just because they can.